of my arms taped behind me. I couldn’t see him, only hear him as he stepped on my neck and punched the gun into my temple. I felt a spray of his saliva. With the part of me that could drain out and witness myself, I heard myself whimper like a muzzled dog.
But Emery was scared, too, and losing his cool. The surprise of Max’s appearance came out in a rasping, screaming voice. “Did you leave your purse in your car as a signal?” He punched the gun against me again, harder. I gasped with the pain. “Who else is going to show up here?” When he saw I couldn’t answer because of the tape over my mouth, he ripped it off.
All I said was, “Go ahead and fire that weapon, you motherfucker. Someone is bound to hear one of the shots and call the cops. They’ll see Max’s car outside.”
A greater sense of concern seemed to have overtaken Emery. He grabbed his pipe from the desk and puffed so steadily that if I lived I would never again be able to separate the smells of cherry, bourbon, and clotting blood.
I pressed my small advantage. “What’s the plan, Emery?”
He thought. He paced a bit. “They’ll think somebody who hates cops bombed the place. Or they’ll think there was a gas leak and it was accidental.” He spoke faster, clearly assuming that any delay was increasingly risky but wanting to make sure he thought everything through. “No, that won’t do, they’ll find evidence of a bombing.” He looked triumphant. “Here you go. They’ll think someone was after you and the rest of us were just collateral damage.”
“What about the bullet in Max? They’ll find it.”
“Maybe they’ll think you went berserk and shot Coyote and then killed the rest of us to hide the fact. It was your gun.”
“And then blew myself up with the whole building? You’re too smart for this, Emery. You know they’re going to be able to figure out that something is wrong with this whole setup.”
He pondered that a moment, gave a final decisive puff, and put his pipe back on the desk. “You know what? It doesn’t make any difference how they reconstruct the crime just as long as they think an innocent bartender is dead.” He put the pistol into the front of his pants. “I have to position the bodies and get this over with.”
He moved toward the homeless man, grunted with the effort of trying to drag a body weighing in the neighborhood of two hundred and fifty pounds. It didn’t budge on his first try.
“Want some help?” I asked.
“Didn’t the profile of me tell you I’m not an idiot?”
“You’ve got a lot of bodies to move. You’re running out of time. You’re going to have to cut this tape off me anyway before you leave so they don’t find it on my body. You still have the gun.”
It was fairly convincing. You lie really well when you think you’re about to die. Trusting in his own brawn and the weapon he grabbed an X-Acto knife out of the pencil cup on the desk and sliced through the tape on my wrists and ankles, knicking me a couple times in the process. He put the knife back on the desk. “You get the heavier end so I can hold on to the gun,” he said.
“I don’t think I can lift that end,” I said.
“The hell you can’t,” he said. “I’ve been watching you.”
I stood up and moved behind Emery’s double, grasping him under the armpits while Emery hooked an arm around his legs. I lifted, then dropped him, which distracted Emery for a moment.
“Sorry,” I said.
Emery glanced over at Coleman. “No delaying tactics or I’ll staple the agent’s other ear.”
We both went at it again, half moving, half dragging the corpse toward the kitchen, where the focus of the explosion would be. Only now, thanks to the distraction when I dropped the body, I had the knife tucked into my jeans and covered with the edge of my shirt.
We moved into the kitchen, where lined up on a stainless-steel counter were six liter-size bottles of alcohol, a twisted rag protruding out the top of each. Now I knew where the smell of gasoline was coming from. He handed me one of the homemade bombs and directed me.
“Slide it under his throat so it destroys his face,” Emery said.
I got down on my knees and did so. I tried to stand, but my back